Full transcript
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0:07In Longyearbyen, Norway it’s illegal to die.
0:11Now, keen viewers will notice that I’ve already talked about this place in HAI #5,
0:15but any good writer knows that if something works once, reuse it to death, sort’ve like
0:20with Family Guy.
0:21Longyearbyen is just so interesting, and, in fact, I should probably just go and film
0:25a video there but, you know, it’s cold.
0:28Longyearbyen is so insanely far north that by going over the North Pole, it’s closer
0:33to Barrow, Alaska than Milan, Italy.
0:36It’s so insanely far north that the sun does not rise for four months in the winter
0:40and it stays up for four months in the summer.
0:42It’s so insanely far north that the average winter temperature has warmed six degrees
0:47in the past 30 years, oh wait, that’s not a very fun fact.
0:51That’s not a very fun fact at all!
0:54For how far north it is, Longyearbyen is a surprisingly large town—over 2000 people
0:59live there.
1:00In fact, there is no larger town further north than Longyearbyen.
1:04Because of this, Longyearbyen has the northernmost university, cell tower, circus, art gallery,
1:10bowling alley, swimming pool, bus station, gas station, commercial airport, department
1:14store, bank, fire station, ATM, Toyota dealership, bar, and kebab restaurant in the world.
1:20It’s a legitimate town, but it’s still 1,200 miles north of Oslo so there are some
1:26quirks.
1:27For one, polar bears live there too and they occasionally eat people, which is bad, so
1:31it’s actually illegal to leave the Longyearbyen area without a gun.
1:35Possibly for related reasons, there’s also a monthly limit to how much alcohol one can
1:39buy at 24 cans of beer, 2 bottles of liquor, and half a bottle of fortified wine.
1:44While local residents carry an “alcohol card” to track their quota, visitors have
1:48to present their airline boarding pass from their arriving flight at the liquor store.
1:52Longyearbyen even bans cats to save the local population of arctic birds.
1:57They just love banning things, but now for the clickbait—dying is illegal in Longyearbyen.
2:03As you can probably tell, Longyearbyen is no beach resort.
2:07The average temperature in February is one degree Fahrenheit so things tend to freeze
2:12and to stay frozen.
2:14In places as cold as Longyearbyen there is what’s known as permafrost.
2:18By splitting this word into two, you can get a sense of what it means.
2:21You see, “perma” means permit me to show you how to put this word into Google so you
2:24can find out that permafrost is where the ground stays below freezing permanently.
2:29While it may rise above freezing above ground, places with permafrost, such as Longyearbyen,
2:34will always be below freezing below ground, which happens to be where you put dead bodies.
2:39The same principle that keeps your chicken nuggets edible for years on end in the freezer
2:43does the same to bodies—not keep them edible, I mean I guess technically, but just… don’t
2:48eat people.
2:49While it may seem pretty great for bodies to not rot away, it’s not.
2:53You see, in 1918 a few people got the flu—about half a billion to be exact—in what came
2:59to be known as the Spanish Flu Pandemic.
3:01Of the up to 100 million individuals who died, 11 were in Longyearbyen so they established
3:07a graveyard that looks like this.
3:10When you put a corpse into a giant underground freezer it turns out that you don’t just
3:14preserve the body, you also preserve the viruses inside the body and so lurking below Longyearbyen
3:20are some of the only active samples of a flu strain that killed 5% of the world’s population,
3:26which is actually quite useful.
3:28Researchers still don’t fully understand why the 1918 flu was so deadly and they don’t
3:34just have samples lying around, so these bodies buried in the arctic permafrost potentially
3:39hold some of the clues that could stop a future global pandemic, but in the meantime, you
3:45really don’t want diseases that could obliterate future civilizations just laying a few feet
3:49underground preserved for eternity, and Longyearbyen agrees, so that’s why death is now illegal
3:54in this small Norwegian town.
3:55If you’re near death, you’re flown down to the mainland to live out your final days
4:00and if you die unexpectedly, well, there’s no space for you here.
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